The Launcher Awakens: A New Build of Edorble + More!

Greetings, Edorblers! We launched Edorble two weeks ago and we’ve been thrilled at the level of interest and engagement from early beta testers.  It’s heart-warming to see such positivity and encouragement in these early days. Teachers are wonderful people to have as users and testers, and we’re grateful for every one of you that has either tried Edorble or who has been simply following along. Those who are bug testing and leaving us feedback – you are helping to shape the future of this online learning platform.

We just made a new build of Edorble live on our website, here are some of the changes:

Launcher – Edorble now opens as a launcher which downloads any updates to Edorble before opening it. This means that as we continue to make changes, you won’t have to keep downloading new builds. :)

Voice chat bug fix – Previously, some users could not get the voice chat to work until they rejoined their Edorble world. this has been fixed and voice chat should work immediately upon entering the world so long as your microphone is set as your sound input.

New controls menu – We’ve updated our controls menu to do a redesign and to include all of the controls.

Extended Windows compatibility – We heard from a number of Windows users that Edorble didn’t install properly for them. We’ve made a more “universal” installer which should work on more Windows systems than before. Please let us know if you are on a machine that still can’t install Edorble.

New Home Screen on the Browser – We’ve highlighted a few services and sites that we know play well in Edorble and put them on the home screen for easier access. These include Dropbox, Youtube, Zaption, Blendspace, and the Poetry Foundation. We’ll write more about how you can use these services in Edorble in future posts.

So there you have it!  Download the new build at www.edorble.com by claiming a new world and going through the download process.  We recommend deleting your old Edorble files before doing this.

In other news.....

We’ve heard from some teachers that they are interested in using virtual worlds for education, but they aren’t sure where to start in terms of what to actually have their students do in them. To support these teachers, and to help build a community of teachers interested in this space to share lesson ideas and best practices, we’ve created a place for free lesson plans and ideas for teachers using virtual worlds. Here already is a lesson plan for language teachers (a business pitch role-playing activity) and a lesson plan for english language arts teachers (an online poetry discussion activity).

If you have lesson plans or ideas that you’d like to contribute to this repository, please let me know at gabe@edorble.com or by tweeting us @edorble